I have been eating healthy and exercising every day this week, and NOW I MAKE TACOS AND FEED MY FAT FACE!
TGIF.
by John Cole| 77 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I have been eating healthy and exercising every day this week, and NOW I MAKE TACOS AND FEED MY FAT FACE!
TGIF.
by DougJ| 52 Comments
This post is in: The War On Women
There’s a word for people who believe in the goodwill of their overlords. They’re called suckers. Kudos to this nun for resisting that temptation:
Let me begin by saying that I want to believe in the good will of the institutional church. An essential part of my commitment to Christ is a belief in the holiness of the church; that is what I professed when I took my vows. For me, religious life outside the structure of the institutional church is hardly imaginable. I love the church. I love its vision of God, its Scriptures and sacraments, its heritage, its tradition of faithful change, its saints and thinkers. I believe in its mission and future.
Yet my reaction to the visitation, and especially to the prospect of “doctrinal assessment,” contains more than a little skepticism. While I’m glad for a chance to “let Rome know the truth” about our lives and our devotion to Christ, I can’t help suspecting that those behind these initiatives are not primarily interested in the quality of my spiritual life. To put it bluntly, I feel that American women religious are being bullied. The fact that the visitation is apparently being paid for by anonymous donors, and that the leaders of our communities will not be permitted to see the investigative reports that issue from it, does not engender trust. And indeed, the dynamics of the visitation and investigation so far have been experienced by women religious as secretive, unfriendly, and one-sided.
The Catholic hierarchy are women-hating conservatives. But I repeat myself. So beating down nuns for doing the actual social justice-type shit that Jesus recommended is a twofer.
It’s that simple.
by John Cole| 55 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Decline and Fall, Sociopaths
Kthug (who Soonergrunt Zandar linked to earlier) has to just love headlines like this:
At this point, we’re in the economic equivalent of the movie Groundhog Day:
Since the beginning of the debt crisis in Europe more than two years ago, defenders of the euro currency union have stuck to a basic argument: if the euro zone’s weaker economies would only keep pursuing policies of austerity, even as growth collapsed and job losses mounted, they would be rewarded by investors more willing to buy their bonds.
Yes, the social cost would be high, but over the long term economies would benefit from the lower interest rates that can come with the seal of approval from global bond investors. Or so goes the argument.
That approach, though, has failed in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. And now it is being severely tested in Spain, where the more the government promises to cut its budget deficit, the more foreigners are unloading their Spanish bond holdings.
Late Thursday, when Standard & Poor’s jumped into the fray by slapping Spanish bonds with a two-notch downgrade, it gave public voice to what investors have been sensing for months now — that it will be nearly impossible for Spain to meet its current deficit-lowering target amid one of the most severe recessions in the euro zone.
For those of you who, like me, do not have degrees in economics, here is a very useful primer for determining who to trust. If anyone ever sincerely used the phrase “bond vigilantes” or asserted that austerity would inspire confidence, and that would turn the economy around- ignore them. Forever.
On a more serious note, how long are we going to live in a world ruled by self-serving idiots who lie or are wrong about everything?
by John Cole| 66 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Assholes
Reason Magazine Editors- Still Douchebags.
*** Update ***
BTW- I don’t care what you think of Obama’s job performance, but this is COOL. Period:
Trust Me- These Guys Know a Thing Or Two About Cool!Post + Comments (66)
by John Cole| 90 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, Sociopaths
I have to admit, I am staggered by this amount:
George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of wrongly killing Trayvon Martin, will not immediately have to turn over donations made to his website, a Florida judge said Friday.
Zimmerman collected about $204,000 in donations through the website, but did not disclose the contributions during his bond hearing last week, according to his attorney, Mark O’Mara. Prosecutors had asked for a bond of $1 million, but Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. made it $150,000 after Zimmerman’s family testified they did not have the resources necessary to meet the higher level.
The story is over whether he deceived the judge by claiming he had no money, thus getting himself really low bail, when he actually had 200k in his paypal account. Talk about that if you want, but what I find shocking is that there are enough sociopaths out there that would donate 200 grand to a killer.
Shoot a black kid, set up a blog, make a quarter million. Our society is sick.
by DougJ| 39 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Fucked-up-edness, Going Galt
Michelle Rhee and for-profit education scams, no one could have predicted:
On January 23 the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the government relations umbrella group for for-profit colleges in the United States, announced that former president George W. Bush would be the keynote speaker at the organization’s annual conference in June at Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
While this generated some minor controversy, it wasn’t really all that surprising. Bush was very supportive of for-profit colleges during his time in office. During his first term, for instance, Bush appointed former University of Phoenix lobbyist Sally Stroup to be assistant secretary for postsecondary education in his Department of Education.
But another speaker at this event is drawing a lot more attention….
[….]
That’s right, Michelle Rhee, education reformer, Teach for America alumnus, someone who works to “defend the interests of children in public education and pursue transformative reform so that America has the best education system in the world.”
No wonder the Kaplan Daily fluffed her so much.
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemblePost + Comments (39)
This post is in: Open Threads, Both Sides Do It!, DC Press Corpse, I Smell a Pulitzer!, Our Failed Media Experiment
The Kaplan Daily accidentally prints the blindingly obvious. One suspects that Sally Quinn will be very upset.
From the article:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
I won’t keep pasting parts of this article into this posting–copyright and all that, but you ought to go and read it. I don’t know if this is going to finally be the beginning of the American press corps becoming useful again, and in fact I doubt it, but it is tiny, faint glimmer of hope.
EDIT: I missed some rather important information here. In other news, every vote against the Violence Against Women Act came from a Republican male. However, not all Republican males voted against it. Lamar Alexander, John McCain, Scott Brown, Dan Coats, Bob Corker, Mike Crapo, Dean Heller, Rob Portman, David Vitter, and every Republican female Senator voted to pass the bill. Sorry about that.
Note: Tonal Crow, at 32: “My God, they’ve committed journalism!” LOL
Open Thread
To be filed under the heading of “Well, no shit, Sherlock”Post + Comments (46)